I agree. This is one of the reasons why sometimes the critique of populists and the populist radical right is so hard. No liberal democracy is perfect and several slip up regularly. What you actually see is that, overall, populists do particularly well in countries that slip up regularly. Hungary was not working perfectly before Orbán came. Italy has a long history of populism for a very good reason.
At the same time, some of them are successful in countries that are considered to be the cleanest, like Sweden or the Netherlands or whatever. It's important to keep perspective, but it also shows the importance of opposition. What you see in the countries like Hungary, for example, is that, to a large extent, with Orbán's power, he's very popular but he also has no opposition, because the opposition, particularly the social democrats, were involved in massive corruption and then split.
Left to their own devices, I personally would trust no one. That's why opposition is important. There is also a major difference between someone who believes, in principle, that there is a legitimate opposition but just under certain circumstances would wish them not to be powerful, and someone who believes that there is no legitimate opposition. They will always go further. This is an important issue.
In my own country of the Netherlands, there is a lot of corruption coming out of the governing party as well, which should be dealt with both by the media and politics much more pronouncedly, if only so that you don't leave issues like this only to the populists, because then they can profit from it.