Local motion.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

THE TWO-MONTH-OLD political crisis has driven home an almost-new, altogether vital lesson: The country's political map has been truly redrawn. We mean this quite literally. Last Friday, we ran a "political map of support/non-support" on the front page, showing the Philippines awash in a sea of green.

Green was the color we assigned to provincial governors who voiced support for President Macapagal-Arroyo after the crisis erupted; the green provinces include the likes of Eastern Samar, headed by Gov. Ben Evardone, who did not campaign for the President last May but is now the spokesperson for the pro-Arroyo governors.

The fact that vote-rich provinces like Pangasinan and Batangas are now counted in the President's column, despite having broken for opposition candidate Fernando Poe Jr. last year, may strike us at first as yet another manifestation of turncoat politics. But we would be wrong.

The fact is, many local executives (last Friday's story also carried a tally of mayors for or against the President) have rushed in to defend the center because they believe the future of the new periphery is itself at stake. Call it the modern paradox of local power.

The spectacle of local executives pledging support to a President under siege is nothing new, of course; in the last days of the dictatorship, many governors and mayors sided with Ferdinand Marcos. The difference is, they had no real power apart from access to Malacaang.

Today, there is a real movement of political power to the provinces, set in motion in the last decade by possibly the most consequential single piece of legislation since the fall of the dictatorship: the Local Government Code.