The Serbian National Renewal was formed around the Saint Sava Society started by
Mirko Jović in August 1988. It was established as a political party on 6 January 1990 in
Nova Pazova with Jović becoming party president, and the novelist
Vuk Drašković and Orthodox priest and theologian Žarko Gavrilović becoming its vice presidents. Soon after, a split emerged between Drašković and Jović, and Drašković left the party on 10 March 1990. His faction would unite with the Serbian Freedom Movement led by
Vojislav Šešelj to form the
Serbian Renewal Movement on 14 March. Žarko Gavrilović left the SNO soon after Drašković, and went on to form the clerical Serbian Saint Sava Party on 15 April 1990. In October, Mihajlo Mladenović and general secretary Aleksandar Spasić left the SNO to form the Serbian Royalist Bloc. Due to these splits, by the time of the
December 1990 elections, the first multi-party elections in Serbia, the SNO was already a spent force and managed to secure 0.8% of the vote and no seats in parliament. In late 1990,
Dragoslav Bokan joined the Serbian National Renewal and became the party's general secretary. He became the commander of the party's youth wing, the White Eagles, which took its name from the youth wing of the fascist
Zbor movement from interwar Yugoslavia. During the
Croatian War of Independence, the party deployed a volunteer unit under the name "Dušan Silni" (
Dušan the Mighty) which took an active role in
Slavonia during 1991, and participated in the
Battle of Borovo Selo in May 1991. On 13 December 1991, the SNO volunteers participated in the
Voćin massacre, targeting Croatian civilians during their retreat from the village of
Voćin. During this time, the volunteers were supplied and controlled by the Yugoslav
State Security Service. The SNO lost its patronage from the State Security after their decision to support Croatian Serb leader
Milan Babić in his resistance to the
Vance plan signed by Serbian president
Slobodan Milošević in November 1991. This would relegate the party and its president Jović to the margins of Serbian politics. In 1996, the Serbian National Renewal was merged into
Radovan Karadžić's
Serb Democratic Party (SDS). In January 2021, members of the Dušan Silni volunteer unit Saša Stojanović, Jovan Dimitrijević and Zoran Kosijer were found guilty of war crimes related to the
Lovas killings in October 1991 by the Appeals Court in
Belgrade. In October 2024, Jović announced that SNO would be reconstituted and that the party would be ideologically conservative and centre-right. ==Ideology==