While research on coalition governments in general is quite rich and broad, we still know comparatively little about coalition preferences. However, coalition preferences are important as they can be influential with regard to voting decisions, especially for strategic voting. In this paper, we try to fill this gap in the literature by analysing coalition preferences in the most recent German election - in particular, we focus on coalition preferences for a traffic light, a Jamaica and a black-red coalition. We argue that we can translate theories from coalition formation research to the study of coalition preferences by hypothesizing that voters will prefer coalition options with a smaller ideological range. We additional include individual voting intentions and accordingly hypothesize that respondents should prefer those coalitions that include parties where their propensity to vote for them is higher. Finally, we additionally assume that other coalition options matter for the evaluation of potential coalitions. Since both, the FDP and the Green party, were considered to be the decisive parties after the election with regard to government formation, we do not only analyse our full sample but also take a closer look at the voters of the FDP and the Greens. We test our hypotheses by relying on data that was collected right before the 2021 German federal election. Our results have important implications for the understanding of coalition preferences and party competition.