MEXICO CITY — Last Thursday, as it has for nearly a dozen years, Leonardo Curzio’s radio show delivered lively debate. This time around, his team of analysts harshly criticized a pair of policy initiatives floated in recent weeks by, among others, the political party of Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

The timing of the proposals — one to route public campaign funds to the victims of last month’s earthquake and the other to eliminate party-appointed representatives in Congress — seemed suspect to them.

The measures “are absurd, populist and cheap, and they demonstrate their eagerness to gain an easy round of social applause,” said María Amparo Casar, a co-host of the show and a respected political scientist, taking aim at a battery of initiatives, including those proposed by the president’s party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which is expected to face a tough fight in next year’s presidential election.

Ricardo Raphael, Mr. Curzio’s other co-host, was even more direct, a risky approach in a country where the media depends on advertising bought by the government. “I think it is vile that apropos of the national emergency, they are trying to get ahead politically,” he said.