IZMIR — On the eighth day of their protests alongside other students for available dorms and rentals, Beril Sengul and several of her friends were hauled away from their sit-in at a park in Izmir and taken to a police station.

“We were released in the morning,” Sengul, a student from Ege University, told GainTV on Sept. 29, the day after the detention. “We will not back down, because our requests are sensible. We need more state dorms because the present number does not meet our needs. … We were simply sitting in the park in a peaceful gathering; we do not know what reason the police had to detain us.”

Sengul and her friends are part of the Movement of Those Without Shelter, formed by students who have been camping in parks across Turkey since mid-September to protest the lack of public dorms or affordable rent. The protests have drawn students from the western city of Canakkale all the way to the southeastern metropolis of Diyarbakir.

The student unrest comes amid rising public discontent over the government’s perceived mismanagement of the economy and is likely to pull down the ruling Justice and Development Party’s sagging poll ratings even further. As many as 7 million youths will become eligible to vote in 2023 when presidential and parliamentary elections are due to be held in tandem. MetroPOLL, an Ankara-based polling outfit, said nearly half of the youth it surveyed disapproved of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.