Abstract The most important feature of a mesoscopic superconductor is that its shape and size have an important effect on the interplay of the magnetic field and superconducting condensate. Usually this effect is investigated via the Ginzburg‐Landau (GL) equations, solved together with the conventional boundary condition. This condition implies that the normal component of the superconducting current is equal to zero. However, the approach based on the GL functional for the free energy does not include the contribution acquired by the cooper pairs due to the confining interaction. In this work we use a generalized GL theory proposed by Shanenko and Ivanov, including the confining interaction, in order to study the way the terms arising from the confining potential affect the critical behavior in mesoscopic superconducting samples with cylindrical symmetry without an applied magnetic field. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)