  We analyze the possible soft breaking of $N=2$ supersymmetric Yang-Mills
theory with and without matter flavour preserving the analyticity properties of
the Seiberg-Witten solution. We present the formalism for an arbitrary gauge
group and obtain an exact expression for the effective potential. We describe
in detail the onset of the confinement description and the vacuum structure for
the pure $SU(2)$ Yang-Mills case and also some general features in the $SU(N)$
case. A general mass formula is obtained, as well as explicit results for the
mass spectrum in the $SU(2)$ case.
