Four years ago, he used his clout to gain a bizarre appointment to the top post leading Bulgaria’s counter-intelligence unit, where he claimed he would arrest and prosecute Boyko Borisov.

Now, Deylan Peevski, the “poster boy” for Bulgarian corruption—his appointment was eventually reversed after mass street protests—is cheering for the former prime minister to make a comeback.

Borisov resigned last November after his presidential nominee was crushed in the polls. He, Peevski and other defenders of Bulgaria’s status quo are hoping his GERB party performs well in the country’s parliamentary elections on March 26.

After settling into his second stint in charge of Bulgaria, Borisov made fast friends with Peevski, a politically connected media magnate and, his would-be jailer.

A Bivol report detailed 1 billion levs in Bulgarian government contracts procured by Peevski during the Borisov years.

More importantly, he refused to intervene and stop a media and government-driven run on Corporate Commercial Bank (“Corpbank” or CCB), one of Bulgaria’s largest banks.

The run was a project of Peevski, Corpbank founder Tzvetan Vassilev told Forbes. While the government of Oresharski refused to let the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) provide liquidity support to Corpbank—using double standards while intervening in other banks in trouble—the government of Borisov renounced the plan for re-start of the bank offered by the State General Reserve Fund (SGRF) of Oman, sealing the bank’s fate.

Such corruption has driven groups like Transparency International (TI), which ranked Bulgaria 28th out of 28 European Union states, to call on the country’s political parties to adopt TI’s anti-corruption platform. A study by TI found 54 percent of Bulgarians ”think their government performs poorly at fighting corruption.”

Even Borisov, who coddled Peevski and presided over the country’s reign atop Europe’s corruption rankings, is trying to recast himself as a corruption fighter.

He told Reuters this week that the country needs “to make the utmost effort in combating corruption, in combating smuggling.”

In 2015, Borisov and Peevski were themselves implicated in a cigarette smuggling and money laundering scandal that involved the Islamic State (ISIS).